IS IT DEAD?

Well, let us argue that existentialism is a dead philosophy. And why should it not be?? We have made so much of progress during the last 50 years. What the nonsense these things are trying to tell??

Yes, my dear reader. You are a successful man. You earn a lot. The latest of technological gadgets are at your disposal. They spare you much more time and energy comparing to the counterparts of the older generation.

Still, are you happy?? Why are you chasing every nook and corner of the world to find your happiness??

We have made startling progress last 50 years. It is alright. Then, why sex-tourism is the one of the top five foreign exchange earning activity for the countries of South-East Asia?? Why cyber pornography is ranked # 1 in the E-commerce?

You are not happy. You are creating a semblance that you are happy by making parties, engaging yourself in all funs. But it is not your true identity. You are trying to hide your true identity from the moment you wake up in the morning to the middle of the night when you again take shelter in the soothing lap of sleep (and that too, probably after consuming 1 or 2 sleep-inducing medicinal pills).

The very process of hiding your true identity wrecks havoc in your inner cerebral world and the so called psychologists/ psychiatrists are making a huge living out of your inner turbulence. They are helping you to create that fake identity that you are happy by the use of counseling or some medications.

You can not be happy. Because you are living in a world which is meaningless, which is absurd. Why?? Let us take a look at this breath-taking image above. Awesome!! Isn’t it? This is popularly known as “EYE OF GOD”. It is the image of Helix planetary nebula .It lies 700 light years away in the constellation Aquarius. But in reality, it is the picturisation of the death of a star like our Sun. So however beautiful may be the world around you, it will die sooner or later. The sooner you will be convinced about you perpetual hopelessness the lesser will be the burden of being.

I will wrap up this week-end by citing an illustration of”absurd world” in a less heavenly way:

“A new UN-backed report revealed that aid from the industrialized world for family planning services in poor countries fell by nearly 8% last year
Of the eight millennium development goals agreed by the UN's member states in 2000, the objective that has seen least progress is the one that affects women most directly. It promises universal access to contraception and other family planning services by 2015, as well as to reduce the maternal mortality rate by three-quarters. Between 2000 and 2005, the proportion of women in poor countries who died during childbirth in poor countries dropped from 430 to 400 for every 100,000 live births – a mere 5% reduction. No progress was registered in sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the World Health Organization, these goals could be met if rich nations stump up an additional €13bn in aid. Refusing to bridge the deficit condemns 500,000 women to die each year from complications that in most cases could be overcome if they had access to proper care.”
(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/2008/oct/05/)

My Dear Reader, Haven’t you found any absurdity in the above excerpt?? You should not have because I haven’t given the link yet. Now. Be ready. Ha! Ha! Here lies the beauty.

“Mr. Paulson made his first proposal for a sweeping bailout of financial institutions on Sept. 19, 2008. He asked Congress for $700 billion to use to buy up mortgage-backed securities whose value had dropped sharply or had become impossible to sell, in what he called the Troubled Asset Rescue Plan, or TARP. As originally outlined, the government would have bought up toxic mortgage-backed securities at a premium over their current deflated values. By paying "hold to maturity'' prices, Mr. Paulson said, the government would provide troubled firms with an infusion of capital, reducing doubts about their viability and thereby restoring investor confidence.”
(Source: http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_crisis/bailout_plan/index.html)

see you next weekend.

EXPLAINING EXISTENTIALISM

[At the outset, I must admit that I am no scholar, no philosopher, not at all a specialist in any subject. I am just an ordinary and somewhat useless (in the contemporary sense) person trying to live a life. I read a little bit as a part of my interest and imbibing upon my reading I want to express my thoughts to make my life less unbearable. By any chance I get the attention of anyone who can correct my understanding of the subject (if I have any) I will be grateful.]

In simple terms, Existentialism tells that you have born into a meaningless, absurd world which you have not created and you can not change that world either by your actions. So your journey would not be a happy and smooth. You have to live through the existential pains until you die. The best metaphor I can suggest for this situation is that you started your dream as soon as you born. You can not control the course of events in that dream( just as you can not control your birth) and the alarm bell rings when you die.

Existentialism in Religious Thoughts

In Bible, we find everything was fine and both Adam and Eve were happy in God’s Kingdom unto their savoring of the mythical apple. Afterwards sufferings and pains became the only eventuality of human existence. And there will be apocalypse in some future time.
In Buddhism, human suffering is an integral part of human existence. Buddhist teachings includes :;The Four Noble Truths: that suffering is an inherent part of existence; that the origin of suffering is ignorance and the main symptoms of that ignorance are attachment and craving; that attachment and craving can be ceased; and that following the Noble Eightfold Path will lead to the cessation of attachment and craving and therefore suffering.

Dostoevsky and Kafka

Literature was the field which was the real germination ground of Existentialism. The grandfather of existentialism is Fyodor Dostoyevsky.His Notes from the Underground tells the story of a man who is unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. In Crime and Punishment one sees the protagonist, Raskolnikov, experience existential crises and move toward a worldview similar to Christian Existentialism. Kafka created often surreal and alienated characters who struggle with hopelessness and absurdity, notably in his most famous short story The Metamorphosis.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Søren Kierkegaard as well as Friedrich Nietzsche was two of the first philosophers considered forerunner to the existentialist movement, though neither of them used the term "existentialism”. Their focus was on human experience, rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science that are too detached or observational to truly get at human experience. They were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Even Kierkegaard is sometimes called the father of existentialism. His Sickness unto Death is marked by the concept of human despair. Nietzsche’s key ideas include interpreting tragedy as an affirmation of life, and eternal recurrence

After the Second World War

Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely-read journalism as well as theoretical texts.
Sartre had dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel Nausea and the short stories in his 1939 collection The Wall, and had published a major philosophical statement, Being and Nothingness in 1943, but it was in the two years following the liberation of Paris from the German occupying forces that he and his close associates -- Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others -- became internationally famous as the leading figures of a movement known as existentialism. In a very short space of time, Camus and Sartre in particular, became the leading public intellectuals of post-war France; achieving by the end of 1945 "a fame that reached across all audiences." existentialism became "the first media craze of the postwar era."
Jean-Paul Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical re-encounter with Being. In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion," what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, and religions identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being (with a lower case "b"). Consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body, but has no objective reality; it is nothing ("no thing"). Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to make them appear, or to annihilate them.

Albert Camus wrote several works with existential themes including The Rebel, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Summer in Algiers. Camus, like many others, rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works to be concerned with people facing the absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it.

Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner, wrote about feminist and existential ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity. Although often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre, de Beauvoir integrated existentialism with other forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time.

Paul Tillich, an important existential theologian following Søren Kierkegaard applied existential concepts to Christian theology, and helped introduce existential theology to the general public. His seminal work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and life's absurdity, but puts forward the thesis that modern man must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite of life's absurdity.

Michel Foucault would also be considered an existentialist through his use of history to reveal the constant alterations of created meaning, thus proving history's failure to produce a cohesive version of reality.

Concluding Remarks: What I wanted to do so far is to explain existentialism in simple terms and give an outline of the thoughts of its chief exponents. Now some questions are creeping up – Is it a dead philosophy to follow? Has it lost relevance in today’s world where people are busy making money and buying fun? Surely, I will deal with these in my next post. Meanwhile, if I get some quick answers on this issue from my readers, it will definitely help me in constructing my next post.
(Acknowledgement: WIKIPEDIA)

EXPLAINING EXISTENTIAL PAIN

Sonja Olson's creation.........


Imagine a situation.. You are supposed to meet your old friend in a cafe after long years. Both of you have talked about much about how would you enjoy the time. You reached there. The proposed meeting time elapsed .Your friend did not turn up. Rather your mobile phone buzzes. It is your friend who tells that due to some official emergency he/she can not come today. He/she will phone you later for a meeting in a later date.
Ask yourself. Wouldn’t you be in severe melancholy at least for some hours?? Yes, you are in an existential pain.

Following Kantian logic (from whom enlightenment begins and subsequent industrial revolutions) your pain is meaningless. Your friend has prioritized his/her schedule and gave more importance to his/her office work than meeting you. But human existence can hardly be caged in such logic (cause and effect). The mere fact that your friend has given more importance to his/her office (material) than you (conscious being) will cause you severe pain.
Now take the same illustration once again and let us change it a little bit. Your friend rang you and told you that he/she can not come because of some family reasons. Now what would be your feelings? Would not your melancholy be less severe? Are not you feeling less pain in this case? Yes it should be so as you (conscious being) are now competing with a similar counterpart (another conscious being or beings) and not with an (material) ‘office’.

Human life is, essentially, a series of such existential pains. But the point I want to mention for the hypothetical readers of my blog is that we must endeavor to reduce these existential pains of each other. So, when you promise to your child in the morning before going out for office that you would come early and play with your son/daughter you should keep that promise. Don’t let the fresh new project that your office has undertaken (for which you may receive a fat bonus) to spoil the mood of your child .Don‘t inflict an existential pain upon him/her/them. And, remember life is made of moments. So don’t make an excuse that you will double the playing time in some other day. Please don’t be a successful man who works almost 18 hrs a day, earns huge but can hardly spell his son/daughter’s name. Alas! What is the meaning of success?